1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to disk drive devices for recording and reproducing signals on disk-shaped recording media, such as optical disks, and electronic apparatuses. More particularly, the present invention relates to a slot-in disk drive device that can directly receive and eject a disk-shaped recording medium through a slot and an electronic apparatus including the disk drive device.
2. Description of the Related Art
In general, disk-shaped recording media including optical disks, such as compact disks (CD) and digital versatile disks (DVD), and magneto-optical (MO) disks, such as minidisks (MD), are commonly known and various kinds of disk drive devices compatible with these disks have been provided.
In one type of disk drive device, a lid or a door provided on a housing is opened so that a disk can be directly attached to a turntable that faces outside through the lid or the door. In another type of disk drive device, a disk is placed on a disk tray that is horizontally conveyed into or out of a device body and the disk is automatically mounted on a turntable disposed in the device body when the disk tray is pulled into the device body. In a still another type of disk drive, the turntable is formed integrally with the disk tray and a disk is directly mounted on the turntable when the disk tray is conveyed out of the device body. However, in either type, a user performs an operation of opening/closing the lid or the door, moving the disk tray inward and outward, or mounting the disk on the turntable.
In comparison, a so-called slot-in disk drive device is known in which a disk is automatically pulled into a device body and mounted on a turntable when the disk is simply inserted through a slot that is provided in the front side of a housing. In this disk drive device, when a disk is inserted into the slot, a load operation of pulling the disk into the housing or an eject operation of ejecting the disk from the housing through the slot is performed by rotating a pair of guide rollers that face each other in the opposite directions while the disk is held between the guide rollers.
On the other hand, there are demands for smaller, thinner, and lighter mobile apparatuses, such as notebook personal computers, and AV apparatuses, such as DVD recorders, in which the disk drive devices are mounted. Accordingly, there are demands for smaller, thinner, and lighter disk drive devices for use in such a mobile apparatus and an AV apparatus. In addition, recently, there have been higher demands for slot-in disk drive devices that provide good operational feel than for tray-type disk drive devices that have been mainly used in personal computers and the like.
However, in a typical slot-in disk drive device, the length of the pair of guide rollers is longer than the disk diameter, and therefore the width of the overall device is relatively large. In addition, since the disk is held between the pair of guide rollers, the thickness of the device is also large. Therefore, it is considerably difficult to provide a small, thin slot-in disk drive device.
Accordingly, to satisfy the demands for small, thin slot-in disk drive devices, a slot-in disk drive device including a plurality of rotating arms disposed between a disk inserted through a slot and a base to which a turntable for receiving the disk is attached has been suggested in, for example, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-117604 (see paragraph [0029] and FIG. 1). In this disk drive device, a load operation of pulling the disk into the housing through the slot and an eject operation of ejecting the disk from the housing through the slot are performed by rotating the rotating arms in a plane parallel to the disk.